The Fish Market of the Necromancers
The moment he stepped inside, Simon realized that everything he had seen so far was nothing by comparison.
This was the fish market exclusive to necromancers.
The stalls were lined wall to wall with nothing but monster corpses. Some were freshly caught, blood still trickling in lazy streams from harpoon wounds, and the floor was soaked crimson from end to end — a sea of blood. Some carcasses lay flipped belly-up; others had their jaws lashed shut with rope.
A paradise of gore and brutality.
There were none of the hawking, cajoling merchants you'd find in any ordinary market. Only people in work clothes, silently going about their jobs. And every customer who came through was a necromancer. Simon watched an old woman sweep a monster's organs into the envelope she'd brought, then shuffle away with a contented smile on her face.
"The undead materials you see in necromancer shops have already been processed once, so they look presentable. Here, it's nothing but the raw goods before any of that."
Benya bustled around energetically as she explained.
"I'll admit this is a place necromancers tend to love or hate, but you can find hidden treasures here. Especially the fish-shaped undead you four need — those fall under the 'Special' category, so buying them at a shop would cost you a fortune. Come here, and you can get them for a tenth of the market price."
Simon looked at her with genuine admiration.
"You really are an expert, Senior."
"Expert, my foot. I'm still just a student — I'm just more interested in this field than most people. Oh! Let's head over there next."
With every step, the bloody water on the floor stuck stickily to their shoes. These were the corpses of monsters that existed only to harm humanity, but the visceral revulsion was unavoidable.
"Will we be coming to places like this often once we're professional necromancers?"
"Probably not."
Benya shook her head.
"Plenty of people love eating meat but want to look away from the slaughterhouse, right? Necromancers are the same. Everyone likes things clean and tidy. We only stopped by because we're here to pound the pavement."
She shrugged and added,
"Still, I think seeing a place like this at least once is good education for world domination."
"R-Right."
Simon made his way around, just as she'd suggested, treating it as the study of a new culture. And looking at everything through a learner's eyes, he began to notice things he'd missed before.
"Do you know how the undead coming into the market are sorted?"
Like a tour guide, Benya supplied a running stream of commentary.
"No idea."
According to her, specimens eligible to become 'Special Undead' were slathered in preservation magic circles and carted off by carriage or ship. Undead that could become 'zombies or ghouls' had to go through a decay process first, so they were moved to dedicated warehouses. Those that could become 'skeletons' were flayed on the spot at the market, their bones harvested. The remaining byproducts were sold off for necromancer research, as catalysts for dark magic, as artifact materials, and so on.
Ordinary livestock and beasts could be turned into undead too, but they were weak. The ones that became undead were, almost without exception, monsters.
Monsters were absolute evil — creatures that preyed on humanity and, even now, remained unconquered by it. That was precisely why local lords encouraged the cultivation of necromancers. The more necromancers there were, the fewer monsters would remain.
The Senior was right — this really is educational.
That said, Simon mused, you clearly needed a pretty broad cultural tolerance just to set foot in here. He doubted Lethe or anyone from the Holy Federation would come within a mile of the place without frothing at the mouth in disgust.
Clang! Clang! Clang!
Just then, he spotted a merchant crossing a pair of work knives with a ringing flourish. In front of him, a crowd of wrinkled old necromancers had swarmed.
"It is now the thirteenth hour! We begin the dissection of the Kicklops!"
The merchant plunged his knife into the monster corpse's belly and drew it straight down. The abdomen split open like paper being cut, and hot steam billowed out in a hazy cloud.
"Oooooh!"
The necromancers watching wore the innocent, delighted smiles of children opening presents on Christmas morning. Before long they were scrambling over one another to claim what they needed. Blood ran freely down their hands, but their eyes gleamed with curiosity as they busily scooped the contents into envelopes. They weighed their prizes, paid up, and wandered off in the satisfied glow of thrifty shoppers.
"All of that becomes raw material for potions, chimeras, hemomancy supplies, poisons, and the like."
Benya explained.
"Normally it goes through a specialized process, but those people seem to want it handmade."
The truth was that while necromancers' history stretched back ages, the history of necromancer shops and undead factories was comparatively short. In the old days, some necromancers had trusted no one else's work and insisted on making everything themselves.
Drinking in scenes he had never witnessed in his life, Simon kept glancing around at his surroundings.
"Shall we start the real hunt, then? You told me what the four of you are looking for, right?"
"Yep."
Forolan. Wulfes. Rodoketus. Gamban.
Aquatic monsters, all of them capable of being skeletonized.
The two of them walked along, combing the market thoroughly.
"Oh, Senior! Look over there!"
Something resembling the bones of a whale over six meters long was on display. Jagged teeth jutted outward, and above all, the long line of vertebrae running from the skull all the way to the fins — like the cars of a train — held a beautiful, precise balance.
"That's a Forolan. A 5th-Grade Danger monster."
"...Meeting one of those out at sea would be the end of you."
The two approached and examined the Forolan closely. This stall seemed to deal exclusively in skeletons, as nearly everything on display was bone.
Just then a man in a metal mask, apparently the shop's owner, walked over and stopped in front of them, his face utterly expressionless.
"The Forolan's in excellent condition today. Degreasing, bleaching, drying — all done. The skeletal structure is superb."
Benya crouched down and inspected the bones meticulously.
"Hmmmm. You really have maintained it well."
"I'm a professional. Of course."
She was tracing the vertebrae slowly with her fingertips when she suddenly stopped.
"Bone 174 is missing, isn't it?"
For the first time, the expressionless man flinched.
"It looks like you made a mistake while removing the organs from the skeleton. More to the point, 207 is gone too. Without it, if you chain 206 and 208 together and use it as undead, the movement of the most important part — the fins — stiffens and goes rigid."
She winked at the man.
"You got caught by the wrong customer."
"...A real expert. I'll take half off."
"Even at 30% I'm not buying~"
She waved her hand dismissively.
"You can ignore what I just said if you like, but a Forolan's bones and organs are fused together tight, so it's hard to cut the organs out with a knife alone — you're bound to damage the bone. In that case, dig a deep pit, bury the Forolan in the ground, and use the Decay spell. Let it stew for about two days, and the muscle and organ tissue break down so you can harvest the bones clean."
"...!"
The man looked over Benya with genuine astonishment on his face. Realizing how young she was, he spoke.
"Kizen, are you?"
"That's right."
"Elites really are different. Thanks for the advice. I'll put it to use."
"Of course. Have a good one."
Benya led Simon off elsewhere.
"?"
When she turned her head, Simon was staring at her with shining eyes, brimming with admiration.
"Ahaha! What? You're making this awkward."
Simon couldn't help thinking that Benya truly was on a different level from Andre, despite them being the same year. Never before had the wall called 'senior' seemed so toweringly high.
"If I study Summoning harder, could I become like you someday, Senior?"
"There's no need to become like me."
She shook her head.
"Undead crafting covers such a colossal body of knowledge that conquering it is nearly impossible. I've grown up around it my whole life, and I do this work because I love it — but you don't need to memorize every little trivia like this. What you should be thinking about is how you'll fight and defeat your enemies with undead. And—"
She grinned and pointed a thumb at herself.
"Leave the tedious stuff to 'us.'"
Simon was genuinely impressed.
This was exactly the kind of connection a person needed to lock down for a life in necromancy. He felt lucky to have met her at school, of all places, rather than out in society.
"Shall we get back to conquering the fish market, then?"
"Yep!"
Meanwhile, at the same hour.
Chaos had broken out at Ballot Port, packed as it was with countless ships.
"Alright — on three, lift!"
"Yes, sir!"
"One, two, three!"
Some twenty burly laborers had been mobilized, unloading something from a ship with the help of magical disembarking equipment.
THUDD!
The moment the object, laid across log planks, finally came down from the ship, the crowd surged around it.
"Good heavens, what is that?"
"A Nether Whale calf, I tell you. A calf."
"A Nether Whale, you say?"
What had come down alongside the log planks was the corpse of a dead whale calf.
Its precise name was Deimos — the only monster from which the Special Undead known as the 'Nether Whale' could be created.
A fully grown Deimos was an 8th-Grade Danger monster, one so fearsome it bore the epithet 'Lord of the Sea.'
"There's a wound on the hull. Must have taken attacks from other monsters."
"Shame it's only a calf."
"What do you mean, shame! If it were an adult, we'd all be dead!"
A small Deimos calf, five meters from nose to tail.
Minute compared to an adult, but monsters like this were caught barely once a decade. Adults had been taken by humanity only a handful of times in all recorded history.
"Now, now, step back. Don't touch it."
A man who appeared to be the captain of the whaling ship hopped down from the deck and pushed the crowd back.
"It goes to auction at the fish market in two hours! Come see it properly then!"
The captain gestured to his sailors, about to order them to move faster — when—
"Pardon me."
A man in a hooded robe, his identity hidden, strode forward and addressed the captain.
"Are you the one in charge here?"
"That I am, but—"
"I want to buy that thing."
The captain frowned.
"Didn't you hear what I just said? It's going to auction."
"I wish to purchase it right now."
"For crying out loud, can't you understand plain speech?"
"I will match whatever price you hope to fetch. And exceed it."
"No, well... Hup!"
The captain stopped mid-sentence.
The instant he saw the two sinister points of light gleaming within the darkness of the robe, an icy chill crawled up his spine.
A guy muffled under a suspicious hood like that is no ordinary man.
There was no reason to invite trouble, so the captain raised two fingers.
"Ahem. Around this much."
He named double the price he'd originally had in mind.
"Now that you know the range, kindly step as—"
"I'll pay double that. Right now, in fact."
The man drew a chest of gold coins out of subspace and set it down before him.
What kind of lunatic...?! Just how rich is this guy?
The captain's hands trembled as he counted the coins. Four times the sum he'd been dreaming of — a fortune he could never have received even if the auction had gone off spectacularly well.
"G-G-Good! Deal! No taking it back later, now!"
The transaction was settled. The man who had completed his purchase approached the Deimos corpse.
"No matter how big your subspace is, that thing won't fit. How exactly do you plan to move it?"
"I'll take only the parts I need. The leftovers — do with them as you please."
Conjuring a magic circle on his palm, the man laid his hand upon the Deimos's body.
Hmmm, finding a summon that actually suits us is harder than I thought.
Simon and Benya kept circling the market, but problems kept piling up.
The fish-shaped monsters they were hunting — Forolan, Wulfes, Rodoketus, Gamban — all had skeletons that served as crucial dark magic materials. That meant a skeleton could only be made if the bones remained fully intact, but by the time they arrived, most of the important bones had already been bought up and carted off by other necromancers.
The ones still complete, like the Forolan earlier, tended to have flaws from sloppy processing.
Nothing lines up with everything we need.
Simon was just starting to wonder if they needed to try another approach when—
Murmur, murmur, murmur.
A crowd had gathered somewhere. Simon and Benya naturally drifted toward it.
"A Deimos!"
Benya gasped, staring at the monster corpse laid out on the logs.
"Unbelievable! This is unbelievable! Even I have never seen one of these at a market!"
"What is it?"
"The only specimen in existence from which you can make the supreme undead, the 'Nether Whale'! It's an 8th-Grade Danger monster — they call it the Lord of the Sea!"
"A-A Nether Whale?"
Simon blinked at the dead whale, all five meters of it.
"It's a bit small for a Nether Whale, isn't it?"
Simon was, of course, thinking of that enormous Nether Whale he'd ridden into Kizen.
"It's a calf that hasn't fully grown yet. But—"
There was a hole punched through the heart region.
It seemed another necromancer had already bought and taken the most critical, most valuable parts — the heart and its associated organs.
"As it stands, we couldn't make even a small Nether Whale out of this."
"...Hmm."
Other customers, too, gave it only a cursory glance on the way to somewhere else. With undeading out of the question, all that remained were surface byproducts, and its value had plummeted accordingly.
"Alright — the auction begins in ten minutes."
As the auctioneer hyped up the crowd, Simon turned to Benya.
"Senior."
"What?"
"Instead of buying that hollowed-out Deimos and trying to make a Nether Whale from it—"
He continued, deadly serious.
"—what do you think about turning it into a skeleton instead?"